China Trip – 1st Stop Taiyuan

Saturday, 12 October 2013

After flying San Francisco to Beijing I set off on a little trip around Shanxi province. China today is amazingly easy to travel around, everything from getting on a flight to finding the right train, jumping on a bus to booking a hotel seems to work!

▲ So I jumped off my United flight, zipped through immigration and customs, took the shuttle bus from the international to the domestic terminal and two hours after touching down I was boarding a China Eastern flight from smoggy Beijing to equally smoggy Taiyuan. It’s another of those cities which seem big enough – 3 million population – to leave you surprised you don’t know more about it. I find a hotel and that’s it for the day, breakfast in San Francisco, dinner in Taiyuan, although a day later thanks to the International Dateline.

▲ Next morning I have a look at two of the city’s attractions. First the Chongshan Temple and then the Confucius Temple with its museum collection of stone figures.

▲ Back to the hotel, check out, walk down the road to the train station from where trains run regularly to Pingyao. I’m there by lunchtime.